In the style of Lincoln-Douglas

Saturday

Apr 12, 2014 at 3:15 AM

That Scott Brown sure is a lightning rod.

The former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts has taken flak from New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen for refusing to take a campaign pledge aimed at blocking outside money; and then he gets it from former Sen. Bob Smith — who wants New Hampshire to send him back to Washington after he’s spent most of the last 10 years living in Florida — who basically calls Brown a chicken for not agreeing to a series of head-to-head debates.

Smith tweeted that he wants to lock horns with Brown on a series of issues, “Lincoln-Douglas style.”

Our first thought was to wonder who would play the role of whom, exactly?

Smith, as we noted some months ago, has long thought of himself as presidential timber and even once mounted an aborted run for the White House that prompted him to leave the Republican Party in a pique for a spell.

And Smith has the nerve to question Scott Brown’s Republican bona fides and suggest he’s a closet Democrat?

Then again, that might make the former Massachusetts senator a good fit for the role of Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic incumbent who was challenged in 1858 by a relatively obscure former congressman named Abraham Lincoln.

Douglas and Lincoln held a series of seven formal debates throughout Illinois on a range of topics. Douglas won the Senate race (senators at the time were chosen by state legislatures), but the debates themselves were credited with raising Lincoln’s profile enough that they helped clear the way for his election to the White House two years later.

Who would be Lincoln and who would be Douglas is largely a moot point — nobody but Lincoln ever gets to be Lincoln, in our view — but if a series of such debates were to take place in each New Hampshire county, we would be fascinated to have even one such exchange contested in a genuine Lincoln-Douglas format.

According to the National Park Service website, debates between Lincoln and Douglas started with one of them making opening remarks, uninterrupted, for a solid hour. The man who went second then spoke — also without interruption — for a full hour and a half. At the end of that time, the man who went first was allowed 30 minutes of rebuttal.

Now, we’ll readily admit that such a format would make for bad television. On the other hand, it would put a premium on substance and depth, rather than sound bites, and might serve as a good test of a candidate’s patience. We envision the most entertaining part of such an exchange, for instance, might be found in the reactions of the candidates not speaking being forced to wait their turn.

In fact, we think Smith is being more than a little presumptuous and seems to be operating under the impression that he and Brown are the only two candidates worthy of such a debate, and that one of them will be left standing to challenge Shaheen when the primary season is over.

Karen Testerman and Jim Rubens — two longtime residents who announced their intentions to seek the Republican nomination back when Brown was still a Massachusetts resident and Smith was basking in the Florida sunshine — might yet have something to say about that.